Can storytelling from the margins lead to recollection of a nation's shared identity? When transmitting knowledge, who determines what is worth preserving? What do fossil-fuel extractivism and energy supplies have to do with lost archives and books? These are among the questions that drive artist and writer Shubigi Rao's first solo exhibition in China: These Petrified Paths.
Known for her ten-year projects that manifest in film, books, drawing, photographs, etchings, and installations with discarded items and archives, Shubigi Rao considers both present-day and historical subjects, offering alternate viewpoints on contemporary displacement – be it of peoples, languages, cultures, or realms of knowledge. Her work offers a poetic, incisive, and humorous critique of the problematic narrative of civilizations and the western knowledge systems that shape our existence.
This exhibition at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai unfolds in four spaces; each refers to a specific term that echoes recurrently in Rao’s oeuvre: the "subterranean", the "sacred space", the "margins", and the "action." She has created phylogenetic “trees of knowledge” in the form of a large, three dimensional energy pylon, 12 meters in height, punctuating the heart of the exhibition. (The term phylogenic tree refers to a graphic diagram depicting lines of genetic descent from a common ancestor.)
